Sheila Hancock told ‘You’ll have to get plastic surgery’ as a young actress

DAME SHEILA HANCOCK was told to get a nose job as a young actress starting out in the 1950s.

The Olivier award-winning actress, 90, is best known for her TV and film roles including The Wildcats Of St Trinian’s, The Rag Trade and Edie, along with her West End theatre performances.

She revealed that she had been told to change her looks in her twenties, telling BBC’s Amol Rajan Interviews: “Somebody saw me in Bromley Rep doing a performance as a model and they asked me to go and see them in the office.

“He sat me under a lamp and said, ‘Well, you’ll have to have plastic surgery’ because my nose is so odd, you know? So I didn’t fit the pattern of what is best to look like as a woman, really, in those days.”

She added that she had acne at the time, during which she was performing in Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables.

Dame Sheila previously told The Telegraph

that when she was summoned to his office she thought she had “cracked it” in the industry.

“Then he said, ‘Well, the first thing you have to do is have some plastic surgery.’ And I never heard from him again,” the actress said, saying her first big break was from a friend who had good contacts in the industry.

Her first roles were in the theatre, where actors had “very low salaries”, and she told Rajan that people “used to come round with hotpots for me because I was incredibly skinny”.

She added: “Eventually I passed out and they discovered I [had] malnutrition.”

Dame Sheila has won a Laurence Olivier Award for her performance as Fräulein Schneider in Cabaret, and had small roles in The Boy In The Striped

Pyjamas and Carry On Cleo.

The actress said she did not conform to the beauty standards of the 1950s